AMERICANWAY

Yurt Sweet Yurt DAY TWO, THE WILDS of Northern California. Things have taken a turn for the worse. The sushi bar is closed. I’ve been forced to eat my fish cooked with a green thing called ramps, as well as artichokes grown from a garden I can see from my dinner table. With this harrowing new reality setting in, I have entered a battle for my sanity. I’ve ordered another mug of cold draft beer and will need extra time in the hot springs tonight. If I don’t make it home, tell Mama that Big Sur claimed another. So it’s not exactly Survivor: The Australian Outback. But what I am doing in the fog-and-seaand- mountains wonderland a few hours south of San Francisco is technically camping. Well, “glamping” (aka glamour camping) , one of those words such as spork that make grizzled old men frown in disapproval. At night, instead of retreating to a motel room — y’know: four walls, a bathroom, a posted warning that if you steal the bathrobe you will be charged with war crimes — I take refuge in a yurt. I knew nothing about yurts before heading to California except that, according to Wikipedia,they were the traditional homes of nomads in the steppes of Central Asia, which sounds like they would have terrible cellphone reception. At a place called Treebones Resort, I book “yurt No. 15 with ocean view” for one night. It was only after I had run my credit card that it struck me that I had just spent the cost of, say, a night at a sleek, modern hotel in downtown Chicago to stay in a glorified tent in desert scrub. Oh, how naive I was. After driving the incredible Highway 1, which takes you over winding cliffs where cows graze contentedly before a backdrop of mist and waves, I arrive at the sprawling hippie getaway and my home for the evening: a fabric cylinder as large as a cabin, on metal stilts, with a conical roof. Once inside, though, I realize my digs are a far cry from those of rough-and-tumble nomads. The yurt is closer in spirit to those plush tents where Roman commanders chugged wine and were fed grapes while plotting invasions. There’s a fireplace, a plush bed, a working sink and an opener for my bottle of white. I turn on the fireplace, flop onto the bed and realize: Yurts are cozy. Like unprecedentedly, mystically so. I know you’re thinking you’ve experienced coziness too. Maybe you warmed your toes by the fire while sipping hot chocolate in New England. To me, that’s amateur cozy, bro. The womblike shape of the place, its skylight softly pelted by rain, shielded from the foggy chill outside, makes me want to plow through a good book and not emerge until the next morning. Then I had the harrowing realization: There’s no bathroom. Not in the yurt, at least. (Not if you value your damage deposit.) So I put on pants and walk a hundred or so feet to the communal bathroom. It may be a struggle, but I embrace it. After all, if there was a bathroom in the yurt, it wouldn’t be glamping. It would just be staying in a motel room with an exterior flimsy enough to slice through with scissors. That first night, I dine on spicy tuna and California rolls at the on-site sushi bar along with my fellow grizzled glampers. Long after nightfall, I groggily trudge to my rental car and drive at a snail-like pace into the blinding fog. I’m headed to The Esalen Institute, a compound that offers self-help workshops with titles like “Healing the Pelvic Floor.” But my mission has absolutely nothing to do with anatomical home improvement. Esalen opens up its vaunted hot springs to visitors from 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. I join a mostly silent, clothing-optional tribe of visitors as we sink into hot springs in the darkness, and the fears I have of being initiated into a cult fade away as I listen to the nearby crashing waves, inhale the strangely satisfying sulfur odor and droop my eyelids. The next morning, as I devour Treebones’ free breakfast of freshly scrambled eggs, waffles, homemade granola and steaming coffee, I obsess over how to go about adopting a purely yurtbased lifestyle. What is the proper protocol? Do you dump your lease first? Or quit your job? How does one go about receiving magazine subscriptions at a yurt? As it happens, on this morning I have a pressing work matter that requires the Internet. Treebones has Wi-Fi, but after attempting in vain to get a signal, I suddenly realize: When one has a yurt, there is no pressing work matter. Instead, I return to my yurt, sit on its porch and listen to elephant seals bark at one another. Just for good measure, I bark back.

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